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Right to be forgotten blasted by Lords [Daily Post (Liverpool, England)]

(Daily Post (Liverpool, England) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) THE European Court of Justice's demand for internet search engines to respect individuals' "right to be forgotten" is unworkable and unreasonable and should be written out of future EU law, a House of Lords committee has said.

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In a new report, the Lords Home Affairs, Health and Education EU Sub-Committee said it was "wrong in principle" to give search engines the power to decide what should or should not be deleted and called on the UK Government to fight to ensure that updated EU regulations do not contain a "right rasure".

The court ruled in May that links to irrelevant and outdated data should be erased on request from searches within the EU, sparking concerns over censorship of material which is accurate and in the public domain.

Search giant Google has received more than 70,000 requests to block links in response to the ruling, which was based on Article 12 of the EU's directive on the protection of personal data, which was drawn up three years before the company even existed.

The Lords committee said that the court's judgment had resulted in material being blocked on the basis of "vague, ambiguous and unhelpful" criteria.